New industry alliance delivers power system versatility

It comprises many competing manufacturers with a common interest in seeing increased adoption of the personal area wireless network technology, and who have worked together to develop the specification and champion its benefits. In wider terms the semiconductor industry would find it difficult to maintain Moore’s Law without a high level of cooperation between companies that are effectively competing for the same design wins. It is generally accepted that without this level of cooperation the rate of innovation would suffer.

In many cases the efforts result in new industry standards and special interest groups. We have seen examples of this in the power industry, and for good reason. Power conversion and distribution underpins the entire electronics industry and must continually change and evolve in order to meet new demands.

At the integrated circuit level the demand for power has changed significantly thanks to the co-opetition and innovation in semiconductor technology. Devices require lower and more diverse supply voltages at significantly higher current levels with every new generation. Many devices require several different voltage/current sources that must be brought up in a specific order under well-defined conditions; requirements that were less common just a few years ago are now prolific on every circuit board. This continues to put pressure on engineers responsible for delivering that power.

Efforts have been made in the past to bring co-opetition to the power domain, in order to simplify the design effort and provide second-source supply chain security. An early example was POLA; the Point of Load Alliance, which focused on DC/DC converters positioned, as the name suggests, at the point of load, and DOSA; the Distributed-power Open Standards Alliance, which has successfully developed and released several standards that deal with the physical compatibility (form factors, footprints, pin-outs) of power supplies from a number of alliance members.

Both POLA and DOSA were established well over a decade ago, when the challenges could be managed through standards that dealt with the interoperability and compatibility of power devices. Since then the needs of the vertical sectors serviced by alliances have changed considerably. The need for more ‘intelligent’ power has emerged and is forcing power device manufacturers to rethink how they can achieve the level of compatibility their customers need.

The needs now extend beyond ‘static’ requirements of footprint or pin-out; they now include ‘dynamic’ requirements such as how quickly a supply line comes up and in which order. These are issues that extend beyond just the hardware to include elements of software configuration too.

The Architects of Modern Power (AMP) Group was established to meet these new demands. The alliance between CUI, Ericsson Power Modules and Murata builds on the work of earlier alliances including POLA and DOSA (Ericsson Power Modules and Murata were members of POLA and all three companies within the AMP Group are members of DOSA).

The AMP Group encompasses three driving objectives: a technology collaboration to accelerate innovation; delivering a true multi-source solution, and developing a roadmap to meet the market’s needs into the future. This approach will ensure the AMP Group delivers the direction and support the power industry needs in a way that previous alliances are no longer able.

One of the ways the AMP Group is helping to solve digital power challenges is through the standardisation of a number of Point of Load (POL) and Intermediate Bus Converter (IBC) formats, which include a standardised implementation of the Power Management Bus (PMBus) protocl. This open power management standard offers a level of flexibility; in essence, a good attribute. However, it also means that manufacturers aren’t obliged to implement the protocol in the same way, which can introduce unnecessary confusion. The AMP Group has included PMBus in the standards it produces in order to maintain compatibly across the devices offered by its members. No other industry alliance targeting digital power has made this level of investment in order to deliver a true multi-source solution.

The dynamic nature of today’s applications demands a new approach to delivering the right power product. The AMP Group’s standards include in-system verification features such as voltage tracking, voltage margining and fault spreading, and provide the level of control required to verify in/out voltage, output current, temperature, frequency and duty cycles. The AMP Group is working hard to deliver the right standards for power today and into the future. The complexity of digital power is only increasing, engineers can rely on the AMP Group to help manage that complexity across an alliance of suppliers, mitigating risk, reducing time to market and maximising design resources.